Wednesday, August 6, 2014

Can the US save face ?, 'A Botched Ukraine Policy'

The
Americans are finding out the hard way that a fact-free zone is not a
comfortable place to inhabit. The initial knee-jerk allegations, voiced
by Obama, by the screechy UN representative Samantha Power, by John
Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and any number of talking heads, were that the
downing of flight MH17 was all Putin's fault. These were swiftly
followed by a complete and utter lack of official evidence of any
Russian involvement but lots of strange, unexplained coincidences
pointing to Ukrainian and American involvement. These were, in turn,
followed by an uncharacteristically frank admission from US intelligence
that there is no proof of Russian involvement. The newly installed
Ukrainian oligarch-turned-president Poroshenko (code-name "Piglet") switched from claiming that he had proof of Russian complicity to being very very quiet.

Incompetently concocted fake "evidence" of this and that continues to
appear on social media sites, only to be swiftly disproved. Once
disproved, the fake evidence vanishes, only to be replaced by more of
the same. The latest fake is of Russian artillery bombardment from
across the border. All of this has added up to quite an awkward
situation for the Americans. Barefaced lying may be fun and profitable,
but it does not provide a solid foundation for foreign policy. Nobody wants to go down in history for blowing up the world over some fake Youtube videos.

The list of questions that demand answers is quite
extensive. Why did the Ukrainians suddenly choose to activate their Buk
M1 air defense system, with several rocket batteries and a radar, in
Donetsk region, on the day of the crash? What was the Ukrainian
Sukhoi-25 fighter jet (attested by numerous eye-witnesses) doing
trailing after the Boeing? Why did Ukrainian air traffic control in
Dnepropetrovsk redirect the flight to fly at a lower altitude and over
the war zone? What were all those foreigners doing in the air traffic
control center in Dnepropetrovsk right after the crash, and what
happened to the flight control records they confiscated? What was the
experimental US spy satellite doing flying over that exact spot at that
exact moment? By the way, was anything interesting happening that day at
the American drone base in Kanatov, in Dnepropetrovsk region, which,
incidentally, is right on the flight path of MH17? (We know that it's
active; two of their drones have already been shot down by the rebels,
one of which landed more or less intact, and the Russians are probably
having fun tinkering with it.)

Some people are surmising that the crash was a failed false flag attack
orchestrated by the Ukrainians with, at a minimum, American complicity.
The idea, this version goes, was to pin the blame on the rebels and, by
extension, on Russia, in order to escalate the conflict. This version of
events may sound plausible to some people, because false flag
operations are part of the standard American playbook. After all, there
was that chemical attack in Syria which almost led to a US bombing
campaign. The chemical attack was blamed on the Assad regime, but then
it turned out to have been a false flag: it was made by the Syrian
rebels, on Syrian rebels, with help from Saudi Arabia, in order to smear
Assad and escalate the conflict. Russia was able to deescalate the
conflict by persuading Assad to give up his chemical weapons stockpile.
(It didn't take much convincing, because Assad no doubt realized that
this stockpile was more of a liability than an asset.) The Americans
were livid; they had been itching to bomb Syria. Had they done so, the
too-evil-for-al Qaeda "Caliphate" known as ISIS, which recently spilled
out of Syria and rolled right across northern Iraq, would probably be
enthroned in Damascus by now as well.

But in the case of flight MH17, the false flag theory rests on an
untenable assumption: that the Ukrainians, if tasked with shooting it
down, would in fact succeed in shooting it down. All previous evidence
illustrates that when Ukrainians want to shoot down a plane, they may
succeed in shooting down a nursery school, a maternity ward, an
apartment building full of elderly Ukrainians, but never a plane.
Conversely, if Ukrainians set out to destroy a maternity ward or a
kindergarten (as they are known to sometimes do) odds are that they will
hit a Boeing. They inherited a now rather obsolete Buk M1 air defense
system from the USSR, which, in skilled hands, is quite capable of
shooting down a Boeing flying at cruising altitude, but you'd be wrong
to think that they have figured out how it works. They held exactly one
training exercise using this system, in 2001, and succeeded in...
shooting down a Russian civilian airliner! There were no training exercises in using this system until... it was used to shoot down MH17!
It was used in Georgia during the war of 2008 over South Ossetia, where
it did shoot down four Russian military aircraft, but there it was
commanded by American mercenaries of Polish descent. Ukrainians excell
at robbing, selling out, dismantling and destroying their own country;
but achieving a specific, precise result as part of a highly coordinated
mission? Not so much. Case in point: some Australian and Dutch troops
wanted to go and maintain security at the crash site, but couldn't,
because the Ukrainians chose the occasion of their arrival to attack
some neighboring towns and villages. You'd think that they would treat
the opportunity to get some NATO boots on the ground as a Godsend, and
act accordingly, but such rational behavior would be, you know,
un-Ukrainian. The proper thing for them to do is to go and strafe some
nearby village, and get themselves ambushed and slaughtered to a man by
an angry babushka with a Kalashnikov.

Once you discount the theory that the downing of MH17 was a highly
orchestrated false flag operation, everything falls into place. Why did
the Ukrainians deploy their Buk M1 batteries and radar in Donetsk
region, even though there was no enemy for them to shoot at? Because
they are idiots. Why was there a Ukrainian Sukhoi 25 jet fighter in the
air there? Trailing behind passenger jets and using them as human
shields is standard Ukrainian practice. Why did that fighter zoom up
into the Boeing's flight corridor and pop up on air traffic control
radar at the exact time the Boeing was shot down? That's a standard
evasive maneuver: the pilot saw a missile being launched, and tried to
get out of its way by aiming up. If he hadn't done that, then the story
would have been that Ukrainians shot down their own jet fighter as part
of a successful (by Ukrainian standards) exercise, held in the vicinity
of an international passenger flight just to spice things up. Why did
Dnepropetrovsk APC redirect the flight over the war zone and the Buk M1
batteries? Because the Ukrainians had recently issued an order that
closed the airspace over Donetsk, well below the plane's cruising
altitude and away from its flight path, but perhaps something was lost
in translation to Ukraine's wonderfully precise official language, and
so the APC redirected the flight right over the closed airspace and told
it to fly right above the minimum altitude. Why did the Ukrainians
launch the rocket? Well, that was probably something like what happened
in the movie The Three Stooges in Outer Space. The stooges find
themselves inside a rocket. Moe gets hungry and pushes a button that he
thinks says "LUNCH" except that it says "LAUNCH." Hilarity ensues.

If that is what happened, then that's really embarrassing, not just for
the Ukrainians, for whom embarrassment has become something of a
national sport, but for their self-appointed American minders. What's
making this situation even more difficult is that western news teams,
following in the wake of the investigative teams visiting the crash
site, got a chance to look at, and report on, the carnage and
devastation perpetrated by the Ukrainians against their own people.
Worse yet, the Ukrainian government, so carefully slapped together out of US State Department-approved dregs of Ukrainian society,
has in the meantime come unstuck. The coalition goverment failed after a
spectacular fistfight on the floor of the Supreme Rada, with the two
rabidly nationalist parties walking out (OK, I won't call them Nazi, but
only today). Prime minister Yatsenyuk (who had been hand-picked for the
job and nicknamed "Yats" by Victoria Nuland of the US State Department)
has resigned. [Update: he changed his mind and decided to stay: or did
his American handlers change his mind for him?] President Piglet is
still there, but it's unclear what it is he is doing. In fact,
it is becoming unclear whether there even is a Ukrainian government; of
late, the officials in Donetsk have been receiving very strange, barely
coherent missives from Kiev, obviously written in American English and
clumsily translated, then signed and stamped by some Ukrainian monkey to
make them look slightly more legit. If the Ukrainian translators run
away too, then the American minders will be forced to resort to using
Google Translate, making it the world's first experiment in governance
through word salad.

The MH17 disaster and Eastern Ukraine are now front page news across the
entire world. The circumstances of the crash are anything but clear,
but it is clear that they are not what the Americans initially alleged.
This they have already admitted. The Ukrainian government is in disarray
bordering on nonexistence. The Ukrainian military is either kettled in
traps of their own devising and suffering horrific losses, or blasting
away at densely populated districts with heavy artillery and rocket
fire. The Ukrainian economy is in freefall, with trade links to Russia
severed and industry nearing standstill. The country is bankrupt and at
the mercy of the IMF. If you feel that the several hundred lives lost
aboard MH17 are a tragedy, then you should consider a larger number: 42
million. That's the population of Ukraine minus Crimea (which will be
fine) and that's the number of lives at risk from civil war and economic
collapse.

The best that the US can do in this situation is to bug out of Ukraine
while continuing to babble incoherently. This shouldn't be hard; bugging
out and babbling incoherently are two things that the Americans are
clearly still very good at; just look at Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.

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